Already Dead
by MostlyHarmless42
Summary: River ponders the affects of the crews' experiences on their emotions. How can someone who survived not have lived? Only lists River and Simon, but includes the whole crew. Disclaimer: Don't own.


**Greetings, fellow Fox haters! This is only my second ever fanfiction, so I hope that excuses any sucky- ness that may occur. Please review! **

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Simon sat there, in the infirmary, the cold warmed only by the soft pulsing of his ever grounding heart. The beat was a happy sound, and I let it envelop me, leaning my head back with a soft thump and closing my eyes. Legs crossed in front of me, huddled for protection from the never ending cold; my brother could never put himself in front of all of it, never save me from myself. All their hearts beating still, filling my head with the wonderful sound of life, even when I knew it was such a hollow victory. How can people seem so lively, when I know they are already dead?

Jayne went first. A boy with morals and values, always doing right and knowing what was wrong, always managing to just fend off the impending darkness, coldness. Until he couldn't. Until it ate him alive and took out all of his heart and soul and left him an empty husk of a man, desperate for survival in the hopes of achieving that warmth that had long faded by the time Captain found him. He was gone long before then, and he never ever retuned. He tried to achieve the life he had known through money, and failed.

Captain was different. He died slowly, letting himself slip away bit by bit. Letting the warmth leak from him, feeding the impending doom, always empty and never able to return himself to him. The first part died when Shadow was destroyed. All he had loved, his home, his family; they were his warmth and they had left him. Until he found more, new love, new life, new family. They died too, all but Zoe, at the place that has become his home, the place he can never leave. They died in Serenity. There were smaller things, too; the things that blow through the ship on a breeze when Captain is sleeping, or when he is thinking. When Tracey died. When Simon risked himself for me, when he told them to light it. When he sees innocent people die, and it's always because of them.

Inara and Kaylee died together- clinging to each other to fend off the burn that would leave them cold. The injustices stabbed like a knife and tore through their carefully collected walls of indifference, making them feel the pain of their crew- of their family. Each time they felt a new wound growing, they found each other and sobbed for the pain of the worlds around them and the destruction of the times that might once have let them survive. Inara and Kaylee died together- clinging to each other to fend off the blackness of the death around them- of the people who no longer were.

They thought I couldn't hear their pain, but I hear everything.

The preacher died with his religion. When faith in God left the verse, he persevered. When faith in goodness followed shortly after, he went with it. Everyone has to believe in something, so he says- but no one did. He faded with them, with his people and moving on with a dancer's grace, trying to keep our hearts alive for as long as he could.

His heart stopped beating just to prove a point.

Wash puzzles me. He never let them take him, never let them destroy him and he shielded his wife, too, or tried. She pretended for him, and let the warmth of his heart reverberate from the cold expanses of her emptiness, and let him convince her that she was alive. A soft correction only spoken in her mind, with a smile on her face; I survived, but didn't live. You're the only life I have left now. However confounding Wash may be, they still managed to get him in The End, with a harpoon gun. And they got Zoe too.

Simon, my brother, my saint. I knew him so well when I was still me. He protected me from our parents and the world, and the boredom that only a select few of the smartest people in the verse can understand. He protects me still, and yet what is left? What can he do to save someone who is no longer there? He pretends and he begs and he gives all he can back survival, if not life. A distinction we can all understand. He blocks the cold from me, and it annihilates him. But he died already. When he saw me on that table, a science experiment, he died. The first time I couldn't recognize him, he died. Each time I wake, screaming in the night, he dies.

I killed my brother. The Alliance killed me. Be wary, for we have nothing left to lose. We are already dead.

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**Once again, whether you loved, hated, or even if you feel indifferently, please tell me! **


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